Our Fetishes

The Pigmy in the forest
So I've heard
Found a glass bottle.
The bottle he found, he worshipped.

The tribe turned the glass bottle into their God
Bowed to it, worshipped it,
Set it in its wreath of fine leaves.
It turned their whole village mad.

I look at the fetishes of our culture
How the bottle is almost like our ideas.
They unite us, they divide us,
They disrupt the continuity of the sound mind.

Good ideas---
Well formed ones---
Are free of fetishes.
It is not Post Hoc Ergo Proptre Hoc
But the distilled singularity of the notion
That it will save, redeem,
Bring some awful power into existence
And manifest the miraculous comfort we adore.

Religion is not the same as fetishism.
Rather, fetishism is some abnormal mental defect
Brought on by an object being placed
As the sole foundation of our reason.
If placed there, whether science, race or holy book,
It produces in individuals the divisiveness
Of all of its defects.
For, even the Bible becomes a fetish
To some Christians---
To not understand its sense
But rather get bogged down in the literal interpretations.

For, the chapters of war in the Bible
To my humble intelligence
Are there to ease the conscience of a soldier
Who has done abominable things.
Not a how to guide on war.
And stoning the homosexual or adulterer
Is much the same, that we've all been degenerates at some point in our lives
And must live humbly with the fact that we deserve a lot worse
Than what we get.
Or, the most ridiculous one
That Genesis must be taken literally.
It must be that the earth was created in six literal days
As you ask anyone educated
It's just not something we can literally believe.
Even myself. 
But, if you cannot still believe in Jesus
Despite that, then you hadn't really known Him.
As, it's just the fetish you've created
One which will be destroyed in the end.

The World’s King

Once said to him, "There is a cycle of 
"Good and bad kings. Now we need a good king.
"For before us was a bad king. What do
"You wish your world to choose as their god?"

The boy, brown eyed and straightened hair said this:
"Love." The Giant to whom he spoke, these things
Said, 'That's too ambiguous. It will fail."
The boy stood his ground, and said, "I want love."

Thus, the Giant pondered on it, and said,
"Do you not wish it to be God, like your
"Father before you? It seemed to work well."
The boy said to the Giant these sad words,

"Well, love is god. I wish to have a love
"Which will set the example for all to
"Follow." The Giant grinned a forceful leer.
"Then you wish to make yourself a god? Hmm."

So, the world all could see him, save I
Who saw him in my nightmares which burnt my
Light being to the core of its foundations.
It was as if I had spoken the words.

This man thought the earth was blue and sky bronze.
For he know not aught upon this "blue Earth."
Thus, it was told to him that he would be
A good king. When, indeed, it was all wrong.

For, he is whom the proverb says, "Woe to
"That man who calls evil good, and he calls
"Good evil." For he sees in Earth the Sky,
So, sees in the Sky what is of the Earth.

To Appease the Critic

Your Jester said to your Poet
That it was best to write 
What was lowbrow.
Your Director saw, 
And agreed that
Appealing to the masses was right.
Your Poet, he wanted to stay
The course to his highborn ideals.

I see that by dumbing down your work
You created Faust.

Me, I look at the Postmodernist poems
And if I tried to write a piece
At my absolute worst
It would turn out leaps and bounds
Better than all but two of those.

However, Goethe, those ugly poems
Appealed to the masses,
The masses of critics
Who are the gatekeepers of my success.

And I look at your Faust,
Knowing it was written to appeal
To common men.
And here I am
In my limited Genius
Challenged by it.

So, what justice is there
If Faust were written today
And it were hidden
By a din of critics?

Fetishism

Feminist's Armpits
Black Nationalist's Hair.
White's Materialism.
Gay's Pride.
Fundamentalist's Young Earth.
Atheist's Science.
Muslim's Koran.
Spiritualist's Karma.
Racist's Hand Signs.
Gangbanger's Club Colors.
Progressive's Socialism.
Blue-Collar Masculinity.

To me, it's all like a medicine man
Shaking his stick
And thinking the rain comes from it.

What Lay Beneath

Word and Tao seem to be called opposites
Yet, each speaks to the same discovered truth.
Beyond the legalistic letters we
Try to use, lies the sense of expressed truth.
Not through matter of interpretation
But through matter of the senses given
We understand one another through truth.
Even more, that lay hid beneath all things
Is an unseen force which does define them.
That we, attempting to stray from that path
Do create for ourselves unhappiness;
For underneath everything is the truth
Which cannot be expressed by the letter
But can be  fully expressed through the sense.
For it is this sense which defines all things
And straying from this sense is what creates
Bitterness, malaise and unhappiness.
And this same thing is the proof of God's Will.

Prose Poem

I bought a little book of prose poems, which were all offensive to my ears. Every gaudy little line, every tacky little phrase, every grandiloquent little flowery line. One I read didn't like Hosea, who condemned adulterers to death. I think to myself, "We all deserve to die, you hypocrite." They talk about environmentalism. Offensive, draught, drivel, burning in my ears are these parasitic ostriches, and simplistic metaphors. That such would even be published, that such would even be brought to this mind nurtured and succored on the ancient belles-lettres  of the past. I hate it. Yet, I would have it never burned, for everyone can have their say. For the only offense it has committed against me, is that it is published and I am not. Should my writing be among the principle letters read for generations, this angst would be sufficed, and I would be at peace. Yet, it is the simplicity of this book which causes people to misunderstand the great art form of Poetry. It is like a puzzle, which entails listening for an hour's time to a few hundred words. But, no one will give my poetry the time because simple poems have dominated the market. So I burn with jealousy; and if I should burn in this unrequited passion, I still should not throw the book into the blaze. For, though hot, and angry, and fuming, it will help me understand someone else. And with that is wisdom worth the twenty-four dollars I spent on it.

Judgment

That God kills an adulterer or a homosexual
It does not bother me.
That courts put to death a murderer
It does not bother me.
That vengeance pour out into the street
And my hand has to take another's life...
It will not. Solemnly I will let myself be killed
And rest in peace within the comforts of the grave.

For, the modern man is the opposite.
They have frustration that God
Will stone the homosexual
But envision for themselves 
The murders they will commit in self defense.
 
I believe in the Gospel because I do not have to judge
But, I also believe because there will be judgment.

Drinking Rum with Obama

In a dream,
I had a tiny beer mug
And a shot glass.

I dripped the liquor from the shot glass
Into the tiny beer mug and sipped it.
However, I was in a Kindergarten Class
Where the rum wasn't allowed
So I hid it, but Obama and I 
Were cool.
We were just watching a movie with the kids.
Obama was sitting jovially with me---
He really is a nice dude---
As I sipped on a little, tiny beer mug of rum
Pouring from the shot into the smaller beer mug, just enough to taste.
It was very modest, you must understand.
I was very diligent to drink only the slightest bit
So I could never be called irresponsible.
And I could taste the rum, and it tasted delicious.
But, it soon began to spill all over me
As I transferred the rum from the two cups
So, at last, I took a healthy swig
From the original shot glass
When I became impatient with spilling
The rum all over myself.

Finally, it was time for me to leave.
So, I wrapped the rum up in a shirt
To sneak it out of school.
Obama had left, and was at the staircase of the daycare
After the two of us were done watching the movie;
We were both the teachers of the class.
And, I picked up the rum
Very carefully,
But still dropped it onto the floor.
It didn't take much
But the glass shattered everywhere
And rum poured out over everything.
So I tried to clean it up.
But, the kids all wanted to play
Around in the area where I dropped
The bottle, and they all wanted to help me.
For, they must have felt my equal
And didn't respect my authority
Because I had brought alcohol into their school.
However, I scolded them
Because they were walking all over glass
And were only in kindergarten.
It would be more dangerous to allow them to help
When I was thirty years old and responsible for them. 
One little guy in particular thought I was threatening him
When he couldn't hear me over the din
But all I was trying to tell him was that
He was playing over glass, where he could get splinters.
He thought I was saying "Knife" and was trying to kill him,
But I was saying "Glass."
I struggled with a vacuum cleaner I had found
To pick up all the shards
But the kids thought it was playtime
And tackled me, hindering even the slightest bit of work.

Obama was gone,
So, soon, my older relatives came into
The room. My mother
My Cousin, and someone I hadn't ever seen before
Who was about my age.
And, they cleaned up my mess;
Which, I was trying to clean it up
Myself, but the kids weren't helping.
Instead they were poking at my eyes
And prodding at me with their toys.
They were liable to get cuts from walking all over the glass
But, I was like one of those bad teachers
Who had lost control of her classroom.
But, my mother came and picked them up all off me
And so did my Cousin, and so did this other woman
About my age, and very interestingly enough.
The situation got resolved.

Bad Numbers

Don't let anyone fool you.
Nine Million Muslims were killed in Myanmar's genocide.
One hundred and twenty million people were pogromed in China
And another two hundred million the last fifty years.
Twenty million were murdered by Stalin.
Fourteen million souls were killed during the Holocaust.

Right now, it's said only one hundred souls were killed in Myanmar.
That only twenty million starved in China.
And---I guess for political reasons---Stalin's numbers have increased to sixty million.

Please, let's remember the past, so we aren't doomed to repeat its mistakes.